Hi guys!
This is my first message to this list. I’m fairly new to the whole rails
scene, though I’m a seasoned MVC developer.
There are two things that made me fall in love with rails so far:
Migrations, and Globalize.
I wonder if anyone knows about using some activescaffold-esque way of
editing multilingual content. I’ve seen something about using globalize
to translate activescaffold itself, but I’d like to make it work the
other way around, and edit some DB contents in all the languages I’d
like to make available.
I know, I can always code it myself, as I have done before in python. I
know I can’t expect any plugin to work with all the rest out of the box.
That would be insane. But maybe there’s some easy option to make them
play together.
~ Chris
Hi Chris
How about checking out activescaffoldlocalize by Ed Moss, one of the
developers of AS ?
Hi, you can use globalize rails plugin, with AS, i used it now, but you
must know that there is a bug with caching translations(easily can be
fixed with patch, patch you can get from forum on globalize web site).
my opinion - globalize is easy to use and powerful plugin to translate
pages, BUT i don’t know is it faster compare to gettext,…
also you should check globalize tutorial on their website!
IMHO, Globalize uses the database as translation “repository”, and this
is contrained to it’s speed. Gettext is very fast AFAIK. For django, I
used gettext to translate trivial UI strings, and a hacky database field
naming convention for data translations. This never worked quite well,
and django-multilingual never quite convinced me (though I know it’s
fairly stable and usable in production).
But after you open translation page first time, all translation cached
in memory, so next time when you open page it doesn’t make any SQL query
to database.
Another big advantage of globalize - is web interface to translate words
and phrases.
Really i don’t try gettext professionally, because i get problem with
adding new languages that doesn’t comes with gettext package. thats why
i choose globalize
Really i don’t try gettext professionally, because i get problem with
adding new languages that doesn’t comes with gettext package. thats why
i choose globalize
What do you mean by “doesn’t comes with gettext package”? IMHO, gettext
is just a library to extract text from certain files. You could just as
well use
body_text = translations[lang][‘body_text’]
You get the point.
It seems like I’ve drifted off topic a bit 
my opinion - globalize is easy to use and powerful plugin to translate
pages, BUT i don’t know is it faster compare to gettext,…
IMHO, Globalize uses the database as translation “repository”, and this
is contrained to it’s speed. Gettext is very fast AFAIK. For django, I
used gettext to translate trivial UI strings, and a hacky database field
naming convention for data translations. This never worked quite well,
and django-multilingual never quite convinced me (though I know it’s
fairly stable and usable in production).
Back to speed, I have a preference for PostgreSQL, for personal reasons,
and it’s quite slow when connecting (due to some heavy auth system it
uses) but pretty fast afterwards. So, if you manage to keep your queries
together (I don’t really know how ActiveRecord behaves in this realm)
it’s blazing fast and very stable. And I like to trust my data
backend 
I will never be faster than gettext, but with a proper setup it should
make up for no real difference.
As for AS and Globalize, I’d ideally like to see AS automagically
noticing the presence of Globalize data and behave accordingly in it’s
views. Might this be a bit much of a dream? I’m still fairly new to
ruby, but I might even try to get this out myself.
What do you mean by “doesn’t comes with gettext package”? IMHO, gettext
is just a library to extract text from certain files. You could just as
well use
body_text = translations[lang][‘body_text’]
I just make a folder with for new language(ukrainian), next i try to
generate *.po files, and it doesn’t generate it.